Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on construction industry: a comparison between Hong Kong and Singapore

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has great impacts on the whole world. Construction industry is no exemption. However, to what extent has the pandemic influenced the construction industry has not been fully investigated. This paper aims to quantitatively analyze such impacts in Hong Kong and Singapore, which are two international cities high dependent on the global logistics and supply chain that is greatly affected due to the pandemic. Macro statistical reports relating to the construction industry performance and institutional arrangement to contain the impacts of the pandemic in general or industry-specific manner were collected and analyzed. Indicators including construction industry GDP, construction site number or contract award number, construction worker engagement, and job vacancy rate in the two cities were compared on a year-on-year change basis. The analyses show that the Hong Kong construction industry shows higher resilience during the pandemic as evidenced by milder changes and quicker recovery while Singapore construction industry, due to the shutdown from April to June 2020, experienced sharp decrease and slower recovery. The paper thus discussed the effects of different pandemic development situation and institutional arrangements on the construction industry performance in the two similar cities and gave some suggestions for the post-pandemic industry development.